A new KDE IOSlave enabling easy access to Freenet has been announced by Jay Oliveri in this message to kde-devel.Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds. Screenshots of the IOSlave in action can be found here and here.

KDE makes it easy to integrate other projects with its extensible IOSlave architecture. The architecture allows seamless net, file and device access for all KDE applications.

To see the complete list of protocols supported check in kcontrol under Network->Protocols. At the moment there are already more than 35, including http, nntp, audiocd (cd grabbing), imap (mail folders), smb (windows networking), floppy (disk access without mounting), kamera (access to photos in camera). Freenet access is an interesting addition, with hopefully more to come.

Comments

Notice that in the screenshot of the GPL text, that the location bar says "freenet://KSK@gpl.txt", but the titlebar of Konqueror remains "file:/home/jd/gpl.txt". So, they've quite possibly viewed their local copy of the GPL, entered a URL beginning with "freenet:/" in to the location bar, and taken a screenshot.
Not that the IO slave doesn't exist, just the GPL screenshot isn't very impressive.

No, it's nothing like Napster!
It's more like an alternative internet inside of the internet...
Using fproxy (standard part of Freenet), you can surf Freenet just like you surf the WWW except that it is Freenet you surf, not the WWW! :)
In the future, you will be able to use FTP, News, mail, etc etc through Freenet! Internet is only used as a "transportlayer" for Freenet. Actually you could do that today, but as it isn't very widespread, and still in development, it's kind of useless....

Are'nt you people looking at http://apps.kde.com??? I've been useing Qtella .2 its very cool. Getting all kinds of cool stuff. Any kind of music out there is on the network. Bluegrass and Religious for me but i'm sure you'll find what your looking for as well.

Hmm, perhaps sometime in the future, kio could be integrated as a kernel module, or as a daemon (i.e. vim /kiodaemon/ftp://...) to allow this sort of thing to all apps, and then the GUI part (download meters, etc) could be seperated.